{"id":10110,"date":"2011-07-02T10:10:02","date_gmt":"2011-07-02T14:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=10110"},"modified":"2011-07-02T10:11:51","modified_gmt":"2011-07-02T14:11:51","slug":"i-remained-somehow-reluctant-to-conclude-that-the-communist-party-of-china-would-flat-out-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/07\/02\/i-remained-somehow-reluctant-to-conclude-that-the-communist-party-of-china-would-flat-out-lie\/","title":{"rendered":"“I remained somehow reluctant to conclude that the Communist Party of China would flat-out lie”"},"content":{"rendered":"

A tale of naivete about the Peoples’ Republic of China through the eyes of an American sympathizer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The first time I tried to go to China was in 1967, the year after I graduated from college. My father was a radical leftist professor who admired Mao Zedong. And that influence, along with the Vietnam War protests — a movement in which I was not only a participant but an activist — led me to look at socialist China with very high hopes.<\/p>\n

I was living in Hong Kong and wrote a letter to Beijing. A few months later I received a charming reply on two sheets of paper that looked like they had been labored over for days by a Red Guard with little English and a faulty typewriter. The letter explained that the Chinese people had nothing against me, but that I was from a predatory imperialist country and could not visit the People\u2019s Republic. Before I left Hong Kong I bought four volumes of \u201cThe Selected Works of Mao Zedong,\u201d and, rather grandiosely, ripped the covers off of them so that I might carry them safely back to the imperialist US.<\/p>\n

In May, 1973, however, I got another chance. A year earlier, in April 1972, the Chinese ping-pong team had visited the US to break a twenty-three year freeze in diplomatic relations, and I had served as an interpreter. I made a good impression on Chinese officials on that US tour, in part because I led four of the six American interpreters in a boycott of the teams\u2019 meeting with President Richard Nixon at the White House. (Nixon had ordered the bombing of Haiphong just the day before; to me, small talk in the Rose Garden just didn\u2019t seem right.) <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Tim Harford<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A tale of naivete about the Peoples’ Republic of China through the eyes of an American sympathizer: The first time I tried to go to China was in 1967, the year after I graduated from college. My father was a radical leftist professor who admired Mao Zedong. And that influence, along with the Vietnam War […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,7,28,53],"tags":[263,622,720,515,76,585],"class_list":["post-10110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-history","category-media","category-politics","tag-1970s","tag-ideology","tag-protest","tag-richardnixon","tag-socialism","tag-vietnam"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2D4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10110"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10112,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10110\/revisions\/10112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}